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THE NEW YORKER, JULY 28, 2014
ideology put him closer to the President.
"They really have the same mind-set
there," Plou e said. Biden held on to his
locker at the Senate gym, where he liked
to kibbitz. He coached Sonia Sotomayor
before her Supreme Court confirmation
hearings. When the White House needed
to pass the $787-billion stimulus plan,
Emanuel asked Biden to call six Republi-
can senators. He got yes votes from three
of them, and the bill passed by three votes.
He became a willing dealmaker.Too will-
ing, in the eyes of Harry Reid and other
Democratic lawmakers, who faulted
Biden for not driving a harder bargain in
the fiscal negotiations.
Biden had half suspected that he could
do things better than a young, inexperi-
enced President, but after six months he
was humbled by Obama's command of
a complex financial crisis that o ered
fe w political dividends. "I believe Barack
Obama's leadership averted a long-drawn-
out depression," Biden told me, adding,
"The hardest action to take as a leader,
as a parent, as a politician, as a priest,
whatever it is, is the one that prevents the
bad thing," because you can never prove
that you prevented something worse.
Obama developed enough confidence
in Biden to assign him some of their most
sensitive tasks, including overseeing the
spending of the economic stimulus funds.
Biden joked that he was the only member of
the Administration who couldn't be fired,
and he aimed to be candid in internal
White House debates. "Every President
would say the hardest commodity to come
by in the Oval O ce is the
truth and nothing but the
truth, no matter how much it
hurts," Bruce Reed, who was
Biden's chief of sta from
2011 to 2013, said. "It's not
always appreciated at the
time,but it's the role every-
one around a President
should aspire to." Leon Pa-
netta said that Obama rec-
ognized a gap in his world view. "He is,
deep down, a law professor, and I think
there's a certain amount of 'Do I really have
to do this?' kind of thing. And Joe rep-
resents that shadow that can say to the Pres-
ident of the United States, 'Yes, you got to do
it.' " Obama took to saying to aides and au-
diences that naming Biden Vice-President
was the best political decision he had made.
Even so, they often disagreed. In 2011,
Biden objected to an Administration plan
to require Catholic hospitals and other
institutions to cover contraceptives under
the A ordable Care Act, saying that it
would cost them working-class votes.
(There is no evidence that it did.) Some
of Obama's political advisers concluded
that Biden's political radar was out of date.
In May, 2012, as Obama was preparing a
careful announcement in support of gay
marriage for the Democratic Convention,
in September, Biden, in an appearance on
"Meet the Press," said that he was "abso-
lutely comfortable" with married gays and
lesbians having full legal rights. Obama
forgave him, but the President's political
advisers were apoplectic, according to
"Double Down," a chronicle of the 2012
campaign by Mark Halperin and John
Heilemann. They wrote that Biden tried
to meet with potential 2016 donors in
Silicon Valley and Hollywood, but David
Plou e shut the meetings down, saying,
"We can't have side deals." After that,
Biden was excluded from weekly cam-
paign-strategy sessions, according to
Halperin and Heilemann. (Plou e dis-
puted that account but declined to com-
ment further.)
Above all, though, the Obama-Biden
relationship was built on loyalty. Once
you become Vice-President, Biden said,
"you have an obligation to back up
whatever he does, unless you have a fun-
damental moral dilemma with what
he's doing." He added, "If I ever got to
that point, I'd announce I had prostate
cancer and I had to leave." Benjamin
Rhodes, the deputy nation-
al-security adviser for stra-
tegic communications, said,
"More than any figure in
Washington, his loyalty to
the President has been ex-
traordinary. I think the bat-
tles built up a degree of
trust that is now implicit in
their relationship." At a
Democratic-caucus lunch
in 2010, after the Party had lost the
House of Representatives, the then con-
gressman Anthony Weiner criticized
Obama for making a deal with Republi-
cans on tax cuts. Biden erupted, saying,
"There's no goddam way I'm going to
stand here and talk about the President
like that." A short while later, he un-
leashed a similar blast at Netanyahu.
When the President is criticized, Biden
"muscles up," Plou e said. The stories
reach Obama. As Rhodes put it, "He
knows the Vice-President has his back."
By June, the crisis in Ukraine had hard-
ened into a bitter stalemate. Militants
occupied Slovyansk and other cities in the
east, but the pro-Russian advance that
seemed likely a month earlier had not ma-
terialized. For the moment, things seemed
quiet. Members of the Obama Adminis-
tration turned gingerly back to the many
other foreign-policy problems that con-
front them. One afternoon, Biden crossed
the strip of asphalt between the West
Wing and the Eisenhower Executive
O ce Building, home to what's known as
his Ceremonial O ce, used for groups too
large for his space in the White House.
Climbing the steps, we talked about Rich-
ard Ben Cramer's profile of Biden in his
1992 book, "What It Takes," a chronicle of
the 1988 Presidential race. Biden had been
moved and vaguely unsettled by the fond
but unsparing portrait of his rise and fall.
(Cramer emphasized Biden's "breathtak-
ing element of balls ... more balls than
sense.") "It's embarrassing when someone
shows you something about yourself that
you didn't already know," Biden said.
When Cramer died, in 2013, Biden deliv-
ered a eulogy. We reached the top of the
steps, and Biden, a bit winded, stopped
to think about why Cramer's portrait
a ected him. "He used this word---he said,
'Biden never does something unless he
can "see" it.' And he was absolutely right.
I never do anything I can't 'see.' "
In his o ce, two dozen visitors were
seated around a long table, ready to discuss
Cyprus, which has been divided since 1974,
when Turkey invaded it to prevent the is-
land from unifying with Greece. Cyprus
wants U.S. help in resolving the stando
and in tapping oil and gas deposits. In late
May, Biden had made the most senior visit
by a U.S. o cial since Vice-President Lyn-
don Johnson, in 1962, and his guests this
afternoon were Greek-American leaders
he has known for years. One of them told
Biden he looked skinny. "I'm working at it!
I'm down to one-seventy-nine and I'm
ready to fight!"he said, the latest in his con-
stant references to a potential campaign.
Biden launched into a high-energy re-
view of his trip; he reënacted his meetings,
whispered in confidence, threw his hands
skyward, vowed to find a resolution for a
conflict that has dragged on, as he said, for